Chapter IX: Part 9

These circumstances must be taken into consideration in Hook's favour in examining the charge of embezzlement. It must also be stated that the information of the deficit was sent in a letter to the governor by a man named Allan, chief clerk in the Treasury, who had, for irregular conduct, been already threatened with dismissal. Allan had admitted that he had known of the deficit for fifteen months, and yet he had not, till he was himself in trouble, thought of making it known to the proper authorities. Before his examination, which of course followed, could be concluded, Allan committed suicide. Now, does it not, on the face of it, seem of the highest probability that this man was the real delinquent, and that knowing that Hook had all the responsibility, and having taken fair precautions against his own detection, he had anticipated a discovery of the affair by a revelation, incriminating the treasurer? _Quien sabe_;--dead men tell no tales.

The chest, however, was examined, and the deficit found far greater yet than had been reported. Hook could not explain, could not understand it at all; but if not criminal, he had necessarily been careless. He was arrested, thrown into prison, and by the first vessel despatched to England to take his trial, his property of every kind having been sold for the Government. Hook, in utter destitution, might be supposed to have lost his usual spirits, but he could not resist a joke. At St. Helena he met an old friend going out to the Cape, who, surprised at seeing him on his return voyage after a residence of only five years, said: 'I hope you are not going home for your health.'--'Why,' said Theodore, 'I am sorry to say they think there is something wrong in the _chest._ Something wrong in the chest' became henceforward the ordinary phrase in London society in referring to Hook's scrape.

Arrived in England, he was set free, the Government here having decided that he could not be criminally tried; and thus Hook, guilty or not, had been ruined and disgraced for life for simple carelessness. True, the custody of a nation's property makes negligence almost criminal; but that does not excuse the punishment of a man before he is tried.

He was summoned, however, to the Colonial Audit Board, where he underwent a trying examination; after which he was declared to be in the debt of Government: a writ of extent was issued against him; nine months were passed in that delightful place of residence--a Sponging-house, which he then exchanged for the 'Rules of the Bench'--the only rules which have no exception. From these he was at last liberated, in 1825, on the understanding that he was to repay the money to Government if at any time he should be in a position to do so.

His liberation was a tacit acknowledgment of his innocence of the charge of robbery; his encumberment with a debt caused by another's delinquencies was, we presume, a signification of his responsibility and some kind of punishment for his carelessness. Certainly it was hard upon Hook, that, if innocent, he should not have gone forth without a stain on his character for honesty; and it was unjust, that, if guilty, he should not have been punished. The judgment was one of those compromises with stern justice which are seldom satisfactory to either party.

The fact was that, guilty or not guilty, Hook had been both incompetent and inconsiderate. Doubtless he congratulated himself highly on receiving, at the age of twenty-five, an appointment worth £2,000 a year in the paradise of the world; but how short-sighted his satisfaction, since this very appointment left him some ten years later a pauper to begin life anew with an indelible stain on his character. It was absurd to give so young a man such a post; but it was absolutely wrong in Hook not to do his utmost to carry out his duties properly. Nay, he had trifled with the public money in the same liberal--perhaps a _more_ liberal--spirit as if it had been his own--made advances and loans here and there injudiciously, and taken little heed of the consequences. Probably, at this day, the common opinion acquits Hook of a designed and complicated fraud; but common opinion never did acquit him of misconduct, and even by his friends this affair was looked upon with a suspicion that preferred silence to examination.

But why take such pains to exonerate Hook from a charge of robbery, when he was avowedly guilty of as bad a sin, of which the law took no cognizance, and which society forgave far more easily than it could have done for robbing the State? Soon after his return from the Mauritius, he took lodgings in the cheap, but unfashionable neighbourhood of Somers Town. Here, in the moment of his misfortune, when doubting whether disgrace, imprisonment, or what not awaited him, he sought solace in the affection of a young woman, of a class certainly much beneath his, and of a character unfit to make her a valuable companion to him. Hook had received little moral training, and had he done so, his impulses were sufficiently strong to overcome any amount of principle. With this person--to use the modern slang which seems to convert a glaring sin into a social misdemeanour--'he formed a connection.' In other words, he destroyed her virtue. Hateful as such an act is, we must, before we can condemn a man for it without any recommendation to mercy, consider a score of circumstances which have rendered the temptation stronger, and the result almost involuntary. Hook was not a man of high moral character--very far from it--but we need not therefore suppose that he sat down coolly and deliberately, like a villain in a novel, to effect the girl's ruin. But the Rubicon once passed, how difficult is the retreat! There are but two paths open to a man, who would avoid living a life of sin: the one, to marry his victim; the other, to break off the connection before it is too late. The first is, of course, the more proper course; but there are cases where marriage is impossible. From the latter a man of any heart must shrink with horror. Yet there _are_ cases, even, where the one sin will prove the least--where she who has loved too well may grieve bitterly at parting, yet will be no more open to temptation than if she had never fallen. Such cases are rare, and it is not probable that the young person with whom Hook had become connected would have retrieved the fatal error. She became a mother, and there was no retreat. It is clear that Hook ought to have married her. It is evident that he was selfish and wrong not to do so;--yet he shrank from it, weakly, wickedly, and he was punished for his shrinking. He had sufficient feeling not to throw his victim over, yet he was content to live a life of sin, and to keep her in such a life. This is perhaps the blackest stain on Hook's character. When Fox married, in consequence of a similar connection, he 'settled down,' retrieved his early errors, and became a better man, morally, than he had ever been. Hook _ought_ to have married. It was the cowardly dread of public opinion that deterred him from doing so, and, in consequence, he was never happy, and felt that this connection was a perpetual burden to him.

Wrecked and ruined, Hook had no resource but his literary talents, and it is to be deplored that he should have prostituted these to serve an ungentlemanly and dishonourable party in their onslaught upon an unfortunate woman. Whatever may be now thought of the queen of 'the greatest gentleman'--or _roue_--of Europe, those who hunted her down will never be pardoned, and Hook was one of those. We have cried out against an Austrian general for condemning a Hungarian lady to the lash, and we have seen, with delight, a mob chase him through the streets of London and threaten his very life. But we have not only pardoned, but even praised, our favourite wit for far worse conduct than this. Even if we allow, which we do not, chat the queen was one half as bad as her enemies, or rather her husband's parasites, would make her out, we cannot forgive the men who, shielded by their incognito, and perfectly free from danger of any kind, set upon a woman with libels, invectives, ballads, epigrams, and lampoons, which a lady could scarcely read, and of which a royal lady, and many an English gentlewoman, too, were the butts.

The vilest of all the vile papers of that day was the 'John Bull,' now settled down to a quiet periodical. Perhaps the real John Bull, heavy, good-natured lumberer as he is, was never worse represented than in this journal which bore his name, but had little of his kindly spirit. Hook was its originator, and for a long time its main supporter. Scurrility, scandal, libel, baseness of all kinds formed the fuel with which it blazed, and the wit, bitter, unflinching, unsparing, which puffed the flame up, was its chief recommendation.

No more disgraceful climax was ever reached by a disgraceful dynasty of profligates than that which found a King of England--long, as Regent, the leader of the profligate and degraded--at war with his injured Queen. None have deserved better the honest gratitude of their country than those who, like Henry Brougham, defended the oppressed woman in spite of opposition, obloquy, and ridicule.

But we need not go deeply into a history so fresh in the minds of all, as that blot which shows John Bull himself upholding a wretched dissipated monarch against a wife, who, whatever her faults, was still a woman, and whatever her spirit--for she had much of it, and showed it grandly at need--was still a lady. Suffice it to say that 'John Bull' was the most violent of the periodicals that attacked her, and that Theodore Hook, no Puritan himself, was the principal writer in that paper.

If you can imagine 'Punch' turned Conservative, incorporated in one paper with the 'Morning Herald,' so that a column of news was printed side by side with one of a jocular character, and these two together devoted without principle to the support of a party, the attack of Whiggism, and an unblushing detraction of the character of one of our princesses, you can form some idea of what 'John Bull' was in those days. There is, however, a difference: 'Punch' attacks public characters, and ridicules public events; 'John Bull' dragged out the most retired from their privacy, and attacked them with calumnies for which, often, there was no foundation. Then, again, 'Punch' is not nearly so bitter as was 'John Bull:' there is not in the 'London Charivari' a determination to say everything that spite can invent against any particular set or party; there is a good nature, still, in master 'Punch.' It was quite the reverse in 'John Bull,' established for one purpose, and devoted to that. Yet the wit in Theodore's paper does not rise much higher than that of our modern laughing philosopher.

Of Hook's contributions the most remarkable was the 'Ramsbottom Letters,' in which Mrs. Lavinia Dorothea Ramsbottom describes all the _memory billions_ of her various tours at home and abroad, always, of course, with more or less allusion to political affairs. The 'fun' of these letters is very inferior to that of 'Jeames' or of the 'Snob Papers,' and consists more in Malaprop absurdities and a wide range of bad puns, than in any real wit displayed in them. Of the style of both, we take an extract anywhere:--

'Oh! Mr. Bull, Room is raley a beautiful place. We entered it by the Point of Molly, which is just like the Point and Sally at Porchmouth, only they call Sally there Port, which is not known in Room. The Tiber is a nice river, it looks yellow, but it does the same there as the Thames does here. We hired a carry-lettz and a cocky-olly, to take us to the Church of Salt Peter, which is prodigious big; in the centre of the pizarro there is a basilisk very high, on the right and left two handsome foundlings; and the farcy, as Mr. Fulmer called it, is ornamented with collateral statutes of some of the Apostates.'

We can quite imagine that Hook wrote many of these letters when excited by wine. Some are laughable enough, but the majority are so deplorably stupid, reeking with puns and scurrility, that when the temporary interest was gone, there was nothing left to attract the reader. It is scarcely possible to laugh at the Joe-Millerish mistakes, the old world puns, and the trite stories of Hook 'remains.' Remains! indeed; they had better have remained where they were.

Besides prose of this kind, Hook contributed various jingles--there is no other name for them--arranged to popular tunes, and intended to become favourites with the country people. These like the prose effusions, served the purpose of an hour, and have no interest now. Whether they were ever really popular remains to be proved. Certes, they are forgotten now, and long since even in the most Conservative corners of the country. Many of these have the appearance of having been originally _recitati_, and their amusement must have depended chiefly on the face and manner of the singer--Hook himself; but in some he displayed that vice of rhyming which has often made nonsense go down, and which is tolerable only when introduced in the satire of a 'Don Juan' or the first-rate mimicry of 'Rejected Addresses.' Hook had a most wonderful facility in concocting out-of-the-way rhymes, and a few verses from his song on Clubs will suffice for a good specimen of his talent:--

'If any man loves comfort, and has little cash to buy it, he
Should get into a crowded club--a most select society;
While solitude and mutton-cutlets serve _infelix uxor_, he
May have his club (Like Hercules), and revel there in luxury.
Bow, wow, wow, &c.

'Yes, clubs knock houses on the head; e'en Hatchett's can't demolish
them;
Joy grieves to see their magnitude, and Long longs to abolish them.
The inns are out; hotels for single men scarce keep alive on it;
While none but houses that are in the family way thrive on it.
Bow, wow, wow, &c.

'There's first the Athenaeum Club, so wise, there's not a man of it,
That has not sense enough for six (in fact, that is the plan of it);
The very waiters answer you with eloquence Socratical;
And always place the knives and forks in order mathematical.
Bow, wow, wow, &c.

* * * * *

'E'en Isis has a house in town, and Cam abandons her city.
The master now hangs out at the Trinity University.

* * * * *

'The Union Club is quite superb; its best apartment daily is,
The lounge of lawyers, doctors, merchants, beaux, _cum multis aliis_.

* * * * *

'The Travellers are in Pall Mall, and smoke cigars so cosily,
And dream they climb the highest Alps, or rove the plains of Moselai.

* * * * *

'These are the stages which all men propose to play their parts upon,
For _clubs_ are what the Londoners have clearly set their _hearts_
upon.
Bow, wow, wow, tiddy-iddy-iddy-iddy, bow, wow, wow, &c.

This is one of the harmless ballads of 'Bull.' Some of the political ones are scarcely fit to print in the present day. We cannot wonder that ladies of a certain position gave out that they would not receive any one who took in this paper. It was scurrilous to the last degree, and Theodore Hook was the soul of it. He preserved his incognito so well, that in spite of all attempts to unearth him, it was many years before he could be certainly fixed upon as a writer in its columns. He even went to the length of writing letters and articles against himself, in order to disarm suspicion.

Hook now lived and thrived purely on literature. He published many novels--gone where the bad novels go, and unread in the present day, unless in some remote country town, which boasts only a very meagre circulating library. Improbability took the place of natural painting in them; punning supplied that of better wit; and personal portraiture was so freely used, that his most intimate friends--old Mathews, for instance--did not escape.

Meanwhile Hook, making a good fortune, returned to his convivial life, and the enjoyment--if enjoyment it be--of general society. He 'threw out his bow window' on the strength of his success with 'John Bull,' and spent much more than he had. He mingled freely in all the London circles of thirty years ago, whose glory is still fresh in the minds of most of us, and everywhere his talent as an improvisatore, and his conversational powers, made him a general favourite.

Unhappy popularity for Hook! He, who was yet deeply in debt to the nation--who had an illegitimate family to maintain, who owed in many quarters more than he could ever hope to pay--was still fool enough to entertain largely, and receive both nobles and wits in the handsomest manner. Why did he not live quietly? why not, like Fox, marry the unhappy woman whom he had made the mother of his children, and content himself with trimming vines and rearing tulips? Why, forsooth? because he was Theodore Hook, thoughtless and foolish to the last. The jester of the people must needs be a fool. Let him take it to his conscience that he was not as much a knave.

In his latter years Hook took to the two dissipations most likely to bring him into misery--play and drink. He was utterly unfitted for the former, being too gay a spirit to sit down and calculate chances. He lost considerably, and the more he lost the more he played. Drinking became almost a necessity with him. He had a reputation to keep up in society, and had not the moral courage to retire from it altogether. Writing, improvising, conviviality, play, demanded stimulants. His mind was overworked in every sense. He had recourse to the only remedy, and in drinking he found a temporary relief from anxiety, and a short-lived sustenance. There is no doubt that this man, who had amused London circles for many years, hastened his end by drinking.

It is not yet thirty years since Theodore Hook died. He left the world on August the 24th, 1841, and by this time he remains in the memory of men only as a wit that was, a punster, a hoaxer, a sorry jester, with an ample fund of fun, but not as a great man in any way. Allowing everything for his education--the times he lived in, and the unhappy error of his early life--we may admit that Hook was not, in character, the worst of the wits. He died in no odour of sanctity, but he was not a blasphemer or reviler, like others of this class. He ignored the bond of matrimony, yet he remained faithful to the woman he had betrayed; he was undoubtedly careless in the one responsible office with which he was intrusted, yet he cannot be taxed, taking all in all, with deliberate peculation. His drinking and playing were bad--very bad. His improper connection was bad--very bad; but perhaps the worst feature in his career was his connection with 'John Bull,' and his ready giving in to a system of low libel. There is no excuse for this but the necessity of living; but Hook, had he retained any principle, might have made enough to live upon in a more honest manner. His name does, certainly, not stand out well among the wits of this country, but after all, since all were so bad, Hook may be excused as not being the worst of them. _Requiescat in pace_.

SYDNEY SMITH.

The 'Wise Wit.'--Oddities of the Father.--Verse-making at Winchester.-- Curate Life on Salisbury Plain.--Old Edinburgh.--Its Social and Architectural Features.--Making Love Metaphysically.--The Old Scottish Supper.--The Men of Mark passing away---The Band of Young Spirits.-- Brougham's Early Tenacity.--Fitting up Conversations.--'Old School' Ceremonies.--The Speculative Society.--A Brilliant Set.--Sydney's Opinion of his Friends.--Holland House.--Preacher at the 'Foundling.'--Sydney's 'Grammar of Life.'--The Picture Mania.--A Living Comes at Last.--The wit's Ministry.--The Parsonage House at Foston-le-Clay.--Country Quiet. The Universal Scratcher.--Country Life and Country Prejudice.--The Genial Magistrate.--Glimpse of Edinburgh Society.--Mrs. Grant of Laggan. A Pension Difficulty.--Jeffrey and Cockburn.--Craigcrook.--Sydney Smith's Cheerfulness.--His Rheumatic Armour.--No Bishopric.--Becomes Canon of St. Paul's.--Anecdotes of Lord Dudley.--A Sharp Reproof.--Sydney's Classification of Society.--Last Strokes of Humour.

Smith's reputation--to quote from Lord Cockburn's 'Memorial of Edinburgh'--'here, then, was the same as it has been throughout his life, that of a wise wit.' A wit he was, but we must deny him the reputation of being a beau. For that, nature, no less than his holy office, had disqualified him. Who that ever beheld him in a London drawing-room, when he went to so many dinners that he used to say he was a walking patty--who could ever miscall him a beau? How few years have we numbered since one perceived the large bulky form in canonical attire--the plain, heavy face, large, long, unredeemed by any expression, except that of sound hard sense--and thought, 'can this be the Wit?' How few years is it since Henry Cockburn, hating London, and coming but rarely to what he called the 'devil's drawing room,' stood near him, yet apart, for he was the most diffident of men; his wonderful luminous eyes, his clear, almost youthful, vivid complexion, contrasting brightly with the gray, pallid, prebendal complexion of Sydney? how short a time since Francis Jeffery, the smallest of great men, a beau in his old age, a wit to the last, stood hat in hand to bandy words with Sydney ere he rushed off to some still gayer scene, some more fashionable circle: yet they are all gone--gone from sight, living in memory alone.

Perhaps it was time: they might have lived, indeed, a few short years longer; we might have heard their names amongst us; listened to their voices; gazed upon the deep hazel, ever-sparkling eyes, that constituted the charm of Cockburn's handsome face, and made all other faces seem tame and dead: we might have marvelled at the ingenuity, the happy turns of expression, the polite sarcasm of Jeffrey; we might have revelled in Sydney Smith's immense natural gift of fun, and listened to the 'wise wit,' regretting with Lord Cockburn, that so much worldly wisdom seemed almost inappropriate in one who should have been in some freer sphere than within the pale of holy orders: we might have done this, but the picture might have been otherwise. Cockburn, whose intellect rose, and became almost sublime, as his spirit neared death, might have sunk into the depression of conscious weakness; Jeffery might have repeated himself, or turned hypochondriacal; Sydney Smith have grown garrulous: let us not grieve; they went in their prime of intellect, before one quality of mind had been touched by the frostbite of age.

Sydney Smith's life is a chronicle of literary society. He was born in 1771, and he died in 1845. What a succession of great men does that period comprise! Scott, Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Dugald Stewart, Homer, Brougham and Cockburn were his familiars--a constellation which has set, we fear, for ever. Our world presents nothing like it: we must look back, not around us, for strong minds, cultivated up to the nicest point. Our age is too diffused, too practical for us to hope to witness again so grand a spectacle.

From his progenitors Sydney Smith inherited one of his best gifts, great animal spirits--the only spirits one wants in this racking life of ours; and his were transmitted to him by his father. That father, Mr. Robert Smith, was odd as well as clever. His oddities seem to have been coupled with folly but that of Sydney was soberized by thought, and swayed by intense common sense. The father had a mania for buying and altering places: one need hardly say that he spoiled them. Having done so, he generally sold them; and _nineteen_ various places were thus the source of expense to him, and of injury to the pecuniary interests of his family.

This strange spendthrift married a Miss Olier, a daughter of a French emigrant, from Languedoc. Every one may remember the charming attributes given by Miss Kavanagh, in her delicious tale, 'Nathalie,' to the French women of the South. This Miss Olier seems to have realized all one's ideas of the handsome, sweet-tempered, high-minded Southrons of _la belle France_. To her Sydney Smith traced his native gaiety; her beauty did not, certainly, pass to him as well as to some of her other descendants. When Talleyrand was living in England as an emigrant, on intimate terms with Robert Smith, Sydney's brother, or Bobus, as he was called by his intimates, the conversation turned one day on hereditary beauty. Bobus spoke of his mother's personal perfections: _'Ah, mon ami,'_ cried Talleyrand, _c'était apparemment, monsieur: volre père qui n'était pas bien.'_

This Bobus was the schoolfellow at Eton of Canning and Frere; and with John Smith and those two youths, wrote the 'Microcosm.' Sydney, on the other hand, was placed on the Foundation, at Winchester, which was then a stern place of instruction for a gay, spirited, hungry boy. Courtenay, his younger brother, went with him, but ran away twice. To owe one's education to charity was, in those days, to be half starved. Never was there enough, even of the coarsest food, to satisfy the boys, and the urchins, fresh from home, were left to fare as they might. 'Neglect, abuse, and vice were,' Sydney used to say, 'the pervading evils of Winchester; and the system of teaching, if one may so call it, savoured of the old monastic narrowness.... I believe, when a boy at school, I made above ten thousand Latin verses, and no man in his senses would dream of ever making another in after-life. So much for life and time wasted.' The verse-inciting process is, nevertheless, remorselessly carried on during three years more at Oxford and is much oftener the test of patient stupidity than of aspiring talent, Yet of what stupendous importance it is in the attainment of scholarships and prizes; and how zealous, how tenacious, are dons and 'coaches' in holding to that which far higher classics, the Germans, regard with contempt!

Sydney's proficiency promoted him to be captain of the school, and he left Winchester for New College, Oxford---one of the noblest and most abused institutions then of that grand university. Having obtained a scholarship, as a matter of course, and afterwards a fellowship, he remarked that the usual bumpers of port wine at college were as much the order of the day among the Fellows as Latin verses among the undergraduates. We may not, however, picture to ourselves Sydney as partaking of the festivities of the common room; with more probability let us imagine him wandering with steady gait, even _after_ Hall--a thing not even then or now certain in colleges--in those evergreen, leafy, varied gardens, flanked by that old St. Peter's church on the one side, and guarded by the high wall, once a fortification, on the other. He was poor, and therefore safe, for poverty is a guardian angel to an undergraduate, and work may protect even the Fellow from utter deterioration.

He was turned out into the world by his father with his hundred a year from the Fellowship, and never had a farthing from the old destroyer of country-seats afterwards. He never owed a sixpence; nay, he paid a debt of thirty pounds, which Courtenay, who had no _iron_ in his character, had incurred at Winchester, and had not the courage to avow. The next step was to choose a profession. The bar would have been Sydney's choice; but the church was the choice of his father. It is the cheapest channel by which a man may pass into genteel poverty; 'wit and independence do not make bishops,' as Lord Cockburn remarks. We do not, however, regard, as he does, Sydney Smith as 'lost' by being a churchman. He was happy, and made others happy; he was good, and made others good. Who can say the same of a successful barrister, or of a popular orator? His first sphere was in a curacy on Salisbury Plain; one of his earliest clerical duties was to marry his brother Robert (a barrister) to Miss Vernon, aunt to Lord Lansdowne. 'All I can tell you of the marriage,' Sydney wrote to his mother, 'is that he cried, she cried, I cried.' It was celebrated in the library at Bowood, where Sydney so often enchanted the captivating circle afterwards by his wit.

Nothing could be more gloomy than the young pastor's life on Salisbury Plain: 'the first and poorest pauper of the hamlet,' as he calls a curate, he was seated down among a few scattered cottages on this vast flat; visited even by the butcher's cart only once a week from Salisbury; accosted by few human beings; shunned by all who loved social life. But the probation was not long; and after being nearly destroyed by a thunder-storm in one of his rambles, he quitted Salisbury Plain, after two years, for a more genial scene.

There was an hospitable squire, a Mr. Beach, living in Smith's parish; the village of Netherhaven, near Amesbury. Mr. Beach had a son; the quiet Sundays at the Hall were enlivened by the curate's company at dinner, and Mr. Beach found his guest both amusing and sensible, and begged him to become tutor to the young squire. Smith accepted; and went away with his pupil, intending to visit Germany. The French Revolution was, however, at its height. Germany was impracticable, and 'we were driven,' Sydney wrote to his mother, 'by stress of politics, into Edinburgh.'

This accident,--this seeming accident,--was the foundation of Sydney Smith's opportunities; not of his success, for that his own merits procured, but of the direction to which his efforts were applied. He would have been eminent, wherever destiny had led him; but he was thus made to be useful in one especial manner; 'his lines had, indeed, fallen in pleasant places.'

Edinburgh, in 1797, was not, it is almost needless to say, the Edinburgh of 1860. An ancient, picturesque, high-built looking city, with its wynds and closes, it had far more the characteristics of an old French _ville de province_ than of a northern capital. The foundation-stone of the new College was laid in 1789, but the building was not finished until more than forty years afterwards. The edifice then stood in the midst of fields and gardens. 'Often.' writes Lord Cockburn, 'did we stand to admire the blue and yellow crocuses rising through the clean earth in the first days of spring, in the house of Doctor Monro (the second), whose house stood in a small field entering from Nicolson Street, within less than a hundred yards from the college.'

The New Town was in progress when Sydney Smith and his pupil took refuge in 'Auld Reekie.' With the rise of every street some fresh innovation in manners seemed also to begin. Lord Cockburn, wedded as he was to his beloved Reekie, yet unprejudiced and candid on all points, ascribes the change in customs to the intercourse with the English, and seems to date it from the Union. Thus the overflowing of the old town into fresh spaces, 'implied,' as he remarks, 'a general alteration of our habits.'

As the dwellers in the Faubourg St. Germain regard their neighbours across the Seine, in the Faubourg St. Honoré, with disapproving eyes, so the sojourners in the Canongate and the Cowgate considered that the inundation of modern population vulgarized their 'prescriptive gentilities.' Cockburn's description of a Scottish assembly in the olden time is most interesting.

'For example, Saint Cecilia's Hall was the only public resort of the musical; and besides being our most selectly fashionable place of amusement, was the best and most beautiful concert-room I have ever seen. And there have I myself seen most of our literary and fashionable gentlemen, predominating with their side curls and frills, and ruffles, and silver buckles; and our stately matrons stiffened in hoops, and gorgeous satin; and our beauties with high-heeled shoes, powdered and pomatumed hair, and lofty and composite head-dresses. All this was in the Cowgate; the last retreat now-a-days of destitution and disease. The building still stands, through raised and changed. When I last saw it, it seemed to be partly an old-clothesman's shop and partly a brazier's.' Balls were held in the beautiful rooms of George Square, in spite of the 'New Town piece of presumption,' that is, an attempt to force the fashionable dancers of the reel into the George Street apartments.

'And here,' writes Lord Cockburn, looking back to the days when he was that 'ne'er-do-weel' Harry Cockburn, 'were the last remains of the ball-room discipline of the preceding age. Martinet dowagers and venerable beaux acted as masters and mistresses of ceremonies, and made all the preliminary arrangements. No couple could dance unless each party was provided with a ticket prescribing the precise place, in the precise dance. If there was no ticket, the gentleman or the lady was dealt with as an intruder, and turned out of the dance. If the ticket had marked upon it---say for a country-dance, the figures, 3, 5; this meant that the holder was to place himself in the 3rd dance, and 5th from the top; and if he was anywhere else, he was set right or excluded. And the partner's ticket must correspond. Woe on the poor girl who with ticket 2, 7, was found opposite a youth marked 5, 9! It was flirting without a licence, and looked very ill, and would probably be reported by the ticket director of that dance to the mother.'

All this had passed away; and thus the aristocracy of a few individuals was ended; and society, freed from some of its restraints, flourished in another and more enlightened way than formerly.

There were still a sufficient number of peculiarities to gratify one who had an eye to the ludicrous. Sydney Smith soon discovered that it is a work of time to impart a humorous idea to a true Scot. 'It requires,' he used to say, 'a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding.' 'They are so embued with metaphysics, that they even make love metaphysically. I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a dance in Edinburgh, exclaim in a sudden pause of the music, "What you say, my Lord, is very true of love in the _abstract_, but,--" here the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.' He was, however, most deeply touched by the noble attribute of that nation which retains what is so rare--the attribute of being true friends. He did ample justice to their kindliness of heart. 'If you meet with an accident,' he said, 'half Edinburgh immediately flocks to your doors to inquire after your _pure_ hand, or your _pure_ foot.' 'Their temper,' he observed, 'stands anything but an attack on their climate; even Jeffrey cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish at Craig Crook.' The sharp reviewer stuck to his myrtle allusions, and treated Smith's attempts with as much contempt as if he had been a 'wild visionary, who had never breathed his caller air,' nor suffered under the rigours of his climate, nor spent five years in 'discussing metaphysics and medicine in that garret end of the earth,--that knuckle end of England--that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur,' as Smith termed Scotland.

During two years he braved the winters, in which he declared hackney-coaches were drawn by four horses on account of the snow; where men were blown flat down on the face by the winds; and where even 'experienced Scotch fowls did not dare to cross the streets, but sidled along, tails aloft, without venturing to encounter the gale.' He luxuriated, nevertheless, in the true Scotch supper, than which nothing more pleasant and more unwholesome has ever been known in Christendom. Edinburgh is said to have been the only place where people dined twice a day. The writer of this memoir is old enough to remember the true Scottish _Attic_ supper before its final 'fading into wine and water,' as Lord Cockburn describes its decline. 'Suppers,' Cockburn truly says, 'are cheaper than dinners,' and Edinburgh, at that time, was the cheapest place in Great Britain. Port and sherry were the staple wines: claret, duty free in Scotland until 1780, was indeed beginning to be a luxury; it was no longer the ordinary beverage, as it was when as Mackenzie, the author of the 'Man of Feeling,' described--it used, upon the arrival of a cargo, to be sent through the town on a cart with a horse before it, so that every one might have a sample, by carrying a jug to be filled for sixpence: still even at the end of the eighteenth century it was in frequent use. Whisky toddy and plotty (red wine mulled with spices) came into the supper-room in ancient flagons or _stoups_ after a lengthy repast of broiled chickens, roasted moorfowl, pickled mussels, flummery, and numerous other good things had been discussed by a party who ate as if they had not dined that day. 'We will eat,' Lord Cockburn used to say after a long walk, 'a profligate supper,'--a supper without regard to discretion, or digestion; and he usually kept his word.

In Edinburgh, Sydney Smith formed the intimate acquaintance of Lord Jeffrey, and that acquaintance ripened into a friendship only closed by death. The friendship of worthy, sensible men he looked upon as one of the greatest pleasures in life.

The 'old suns,' Lord Cockburn tells us, 'were setting when the band of great thinkers and great writers who afterwards concocted the "Edinburgh Review," were rising into celebrity.' Principal Robertson, the historian, had departed this life in 1793, a kindly old man. With beaming eyes underneath his frizzed and curled wig, and a trumpet tied with a black ribbon to the button-hole of his coat, for he was deaf, this most excellent of writers showed how he could be also the most zealous of diners. Old Adam Ferguson, the historian of Rome, had 'set,' also: one of the finest specimens of humanity had gone from among his people in him. Old people, not thirty years ago, delighted to tell you how 'Adam,' when chaplain to the Black Watch, that glorious 42nd, refused to retire to his proper place, the rear, during an action, but persisted in being engaged in front. He was also gone; and Dugald Stewart filled his vacant place in the professorship of moral philosophy. Dr. Henry, the historian, was also at rest; after a long laborious life, and the compilation of a dull, though admirable History of England, the design of which, in making a chapter on arts, manners, and literature separate from the narrative, appears to have suggested to Macaulay his inimitable disquisition on the same topics. Dr. Henry showed to a friend a pile of books which he had gone through, merely to satisfy himself and the world as to what description of trousers was worn by the Saxons. His death was calm as his life. 'Come out to me directly,' he wrote to his friend, Sir Harry Moncrieff: 'I have got something to do this week; I have got to die.'

It was in 1801, that Dugald Stewart began his course of lectures on political economy. Hitherto all public favour had been on the side of the Tories, and independence of thought was a sure way to incur discouragement from the Bench, in the Church, and from every Government functionary. Lectures on political economy were regarded as innovations; but they formed a forerunner of that event which had made several important changes in our literary and political hemisphere: the commencement of the 'Edinburgh Review.' This undertaking was the work of men who were separated from the mass of their brother-townsmen by their politics; their isolation as a class binding them the more closely together by links never broken, in a brotherhood of hope and ambition, to which the natural spirits of Sydney Smith, of Cockburn, and of Jeffrey, gave an irresistible charm.

Among those who the most early in life ended a career of promise was Francis Horner. He was the son of a linen-draper in Edinburgh; or, as the Scotch call it, following the French, a merchant. Homer's best linen for sheets, and table-cloths, and all the _under garments_ of housekeeping, are still highly esteemed by the trade.

'My desire to know Horner,' Sydney Smith states, 'arose from my being cautioned against him by some excellent and feeble-minded people to whom I brought letters of introduction, and who represented him as a person of violent political opinions.' Sydney Smith interpreted this to mean that Horner was a man who thought for himself; who loved truth better than he loved Dundas (Lord Melville), then the tyrant of Scotland. 'It is very curious to consider,' Sydney Smith wrote, in addressing Lady Holland, in 1817, 'in what manner Horner gained, in so extraordinary a degree, the affections of such a number of persons of both sexes, all ages, parties, and ranks in society; for he was not remarkably good tempered, nor particularly lively and agreeable; and an inflexible politician on the unpopular side. The causes are, his high character for probity, honour, and talents; his fine countenance; the benevolent interest he took in the concerns of all his friends; his simple and gentlemanlike manners; his untimely death.' 'Grave, studious, honourable, kind, everything Horner did,' says Lord Cockburn, 'was marked by thoughtfulness and kindness;' a beautiful character, which was exhibited but briefly to his contemporaries, but long remembered after his death.

Henry Brougham was another of the Edinburgh band of young spirits. He was educated in the High School under Luke Fraser, the tutor who trained Walter Scott and Francis Jeffrey. Brougham used to be pointed out 'as the fellow who had beat the master.' He had dared to differ with Fraser, a hot pedant, on some piece of Latinity. Fraser, irritated, punished the rebel, and thought the matter ended. But the next day 'Harry,' as they called him, appeared, loaded with books, renewed the charge, and forced Luke to own that he was beaten. 'It was then,' says Lord Cockburn, 'that I first saw him.'

After remaining two years in Edinburgh, Sydney Smith went southwards to marry a former schoolfellow of his sister Maria's--a Miss Pybus, to whom he had been attached and engaged at a very early period of his life. The young lady, who was of West Indian descent, had some fortune; but her husband's only stock, on which to begin housekeeping, consisted of six silver tea-spoons, worn away with use. One day he rushed into the room and threw these attenuated articles into her lap--'There, Kate, I give you all my fortune, you lucky girl!'

With the small _dôt_, and the thin silver-spoons, the young couple set up housekeeping in the 'garret end of the earth.' Their first difficulty was to know how money could be obtained to begin with, for Mrs. Smith's small fortune was settled on herself by her husband's wish. Two rows of pearls had been given her by her thoughtful mother. These she converted into money, and obtained for them £500. Several years afterwards, when visiting the shop at which she sold them, with Miss Vernon and Miss Fox, Mrs. Smith saw her pearls, every one of which she knew. She asked what was the price. '£1,500,' was the reply.

The sum, however, was all important to the thrifty couple. It distanced the nightmare of the poor and honest,--debt. £750 was presented by Mr. Beach, in gratitude for the care of his son, to Smith. It was invested in the funds, and formed the nucleus of future savings,--'_Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte_' is a trite saying. '_C'est le premier pas qui gagne_, might be applied to this and similar cases. A little daughter--Lady Holland, the wife of the celebrated physician, Sir Henry Holland--was sent to bless the sensible pair. Sydney had wished that she might be born with one eye, so that he might never lose her; nevertheless, though she happened to be born with two, he bore her secretly from the nursery, a few hours after her birth, to show her in triumph to the future Edinburgh Reviewers.

The birth of the 'Edinburgh Review' quickly followed that of the young lady. Jeffrey,--then an almost starving barrister, living in the eighth or ninth flat of a house in Buccleuch Place,--Brougham, and Sydney Smith were the triumvirate who propounded the scheme, Smith being the first mover. He proposed a motto: 'Tenui Musam meditanum avenir:' We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal; but this being too near the truth, they took their motto from Publius Syrus; 'of whom,' said Smith, 'none of us had, I am sure, read a single line.' To this undertaking Sydney Smith devoted his talents for more than twenty-eight years.

Meantime, during the brief remainder of his stay in Edinburgh, his circumstances improved. He had done that which most of the clergy are obliged to do--taken a pupil. He had now another, the son of Mr. Gordon, of Ellon; for each of these young men he received £400 a year. He became to them a father and a friend; he entered into all their amusements. One of them saying that he could not find conversation at the balls for his partners, 'Never mind,' cried Sydney Smith, 'I'll fit you up in five minutes.' Accordingly he wrote down conversations for them amid bursts of laughter.

Thus happily did years, which many persons would have termed a season of adversity, pass away. The chance which brought him to Edinburgh introduced him to a state of society never likely to be seen again in Scotland. Lord Cockburn's 'Memorials' afford an insight into manners, not only as regarded suppers, but on the still momentous point, of dinners. Three o'clock was the fashionable hour, so late as the commencement of the present century. That hour, 'not without groans and predictions,' became four--and four was long and conscientiously adhered to. 'Inch by inch,' people yielded, and five continued to be the standard polite hour from 1806 to 1820. 'Six has at length prevailed.'

The most punctilious ceremony existed. When dinner was announced, a file of ladies went first in strict order of precedence. 'Mrs. Colonel Such an One;' 'Mrs. Doctor Such an One,' and so on. Toasts were _de rigueur_: no glass of wine was to be taken by a guest without comprehending a lady, or a covey of ladies. 'I was present,' says Lord Cockburn, 'when the late Duke of Buccleuch took a glass of sherry by himself at the table of Charles Hope, then Lord Advocate, and this was noticed as a piece of ducal contempt.' Toasts, and when the ladies had retired, _rounds_ of toasts, were drunk. 'The prandial nuisance,' Lord Cockburn wrote, 'was horrible. But it was nothing to what followed.'

At these repasts, though less at these than at boisterous suppers, a frequent visitor at the same table with Sydney Smith was the illustrious Sir James Mackintosh, a man to whose deep-thinking mind the world is every day rendering justice. The son of a brave officer, Mackintosh was born on the banks of Loch Ness: his mother, a Miss Fraser, was aunt to Mrs. Fraser Tytler, wife of Lord Woodhouselee, one of the judges of the Court of Session and mother of the late historian of that honoured name.

Mackintosh had been studying at Aberdeen, in the same classes with Robert Hall, whose conversation, he avowed, had a great influence over his mind. He arrived in Edinburgh about 1784, uncertain to what profession to belong; somewhat anxious to be a bookseller, in order to revel in 'the paradise of books;' he turned his attention, however, to medicine, and became a Brunonian, that is, a disciple of John Brown, the founder of a theory which he followed out to the extent in practice. The main feature of the now defunct system, which set scientific Europe in a blaze, seems to have been a mad indulgence of the passions; and an unbridled use of intoxicating liquors. Brown fell a victim to his vices. Years after he had been laid in his grave, his daughter, Euphemia, being in great indigence, received real kindness from Sir James and Lady Mackintosh, the former of whom used to delight in telling the story of her father's saying to her: 'Effy, bring me the mooderate stimulus of a hoonderd draps o' laudanum in a glass o' brandy.'

Mackintosh had not quitted Edinburgh when Sydney Smith reached it. Smith became a member of the famous Speculative Society. Their acquaintance was renewed years afterwards in London. Who can ever forget the small, quiet dinners given by Mackintosh when living out of Parliament, and out of office in Cadogan Place? Simple but genial were those repasts, forming a strong contrast to the Edinburgh dinners of yore. He had then long given up both the theory and practice of the Brunonians, and took nothing but light French and German wines, and these in moderation. His tall, somewhat high-shouldered, massive form; his calm brow, mild, thoughtful; his dignity of manner; his gentleness to all; his vast knowledge; his wonderful appreciation of excellence; his discrimination of faults--all combined to form one of the finest specimens ever seen, even in that illustrious period, of a philosopher and historian.

Jeffrey and Cockburn were contrasts to one whom they honoured. Jeffrey, 'the greatest of British critics,' was eight years younger than Mackintosh, having been born in 1773. He was the son of one of the depute clerks to the Supreme Court, not an elevated position, though one of great respectability. When Mackintosh and Sydney Smith first knew him in Edinburgh, he was enduring, with all the impatience of his sensitive nature, what he called 'a slow, obscure, philosophical starvation' at the Scotch bar.

'There are moments,' he wrote, 'when I think I could sell myself to the ministers or to the devil, in order to get above these necessities.' Like all men so situated, his depression came in fits. Short, spare, with regular, yet _not_ aristocratic features;--speaking, brilliant, yet _not_ pleasing eyes;--a voice consistent with that _mignon_ form;--a somewhat precise and anxious manner, there was never in Jeffrey that charm, that _abandon_, which rendered his valued friend, Henry Cockburn, the most delightful, the most beloved of men, the very idol of his native city.

The noble head of Cockburn, bald, almost in youth, with its pliant, refined features, and its fresh tint upon a cheek always clear, generally high in colour, was a strong contrast to the rigid _petitesse_ of Jeffrey's physiognomy; much more so to the large proportions of Mackintosh; or to the ponderous, plain, and, later in life, swarthy countenance of Sydney Smith. Lord Webb Seymour, the brother of the late Duke of Somerset, gentle, modest, intelligent,--Thomas Thomson, the antiquary,--and Charles and George Bell, the surgeon and the advocate,-- Murray, afterwards Lord Murray, the generous pleader, who gave up to its rightful heirs an estate left him by a client,--and Brougham--formed the staple of that set now long since extinct.

It was partially broken up by Sydney Smith's coming, in 1803, to London. He there took a house in Doughty Street, being partial to legal society, which was chiefly to be found in that neighbourhood.

Here Sir Samuel Romilly, Mackintosh, Scarlett (Lord Abinger), the eccentric and unhappy Mr. Ward, afterwards Lord Dudley, 'Conversation' Sharp, Rogers, and Luttrell, formed the circle in which Sidney delighted. He was still very poor, and obliged to sell the rest of his wife's jewels; but his brother Robert allowed him £100 a year, and lent him, when he subsequently removed into Yorkshire, £500.

He had now a life of struggling, but those struggles were the lot of his early friends also; Mackintosh talked of going to India as a lecturer; Smith recommended Jeffrey to do the same. Happily, both had the courage and the sense to await for better times at home; yet Smith's opinion of Mackintosh was, that 'he never saw so theoretical a head which contained so much practical understanding;' and to Jeffrey he wrote:

'You want nothing to be a great lawyer, and nothing to be a great speaker, but a deeper voice--slower and more simple utterance--more humility of face and neck--and a greater contempt for _esprit_ than men _who have so much_ in general attain to.'

The great event of Sydney Smith's first residence in London was his introduction at Holland House; in that 'gilded room which furnished,' as he said, 'the best and most agreeable society in the world,' his happiest hours were passed. John Allen, whom Smith had introduced to Lord Holland was the peer's librarian and friend. Mackintosh, who Sydney Smith thought only wanted a few bad qualities to get on in the world, Rogers, Luttrell, Sheridan, Byron, were among the 'suns' that shone, where Addison had suffered and studied.